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incorporate community content from a network of 127 local bloggers

community engagement and newsgathering through social tools like Twitter () and Foursquare (

web video

paving the way for new applications in telepresence, telemedicine, industrial design, gaming and entertainment.

Gowalla () users who follow USA Today and check in at major U.S. airports will receive airport and airline news and features from the news organization’s Travel section and online community.

“Because SCVNGR has all this premium activity (challenges, not just checkins), our location-based activity items get surfaced far more often in Facebook’s () activity algorithms, meaning that we get more placement, comments and likes,” says CEO Seth Priebatsch.When coupled with SCVNGR’s previous Facebook Places integration features and do-it-yourself rewards system, the application completes the loop and turns the Place Page into something much more than a repository of checkins.

Since the start of the year, a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — supported by grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Google, and tapping into a research supercomputing cluster provided by Yahoo — has been fine-tuning a computer system that is trying to master semantics by learning more like a human. Its beating hardware heart is a sleek, silver-gray computer — calculating 24 hours a day, seven days a week — that resides in a basement computer center at the university, in Pittsburgh. The computer was primed by the researchers with some basic knowledge in various categories and set loose on the Web with a mission to teach itself.

The Never-Ending Language Learning system, or NELL, has made an impressive showing so far. NELL scans hundreds of millions of Web pages for text patterns that it uses to learn facts, 390,000 to date, with an estimated accuracy of 87 percent. These facts are grouped into semantic categories — cities, companies, sports teams, actors, universities, plants and 274 others. The category facts are things like “San Francisco is a city” and “sunflower is a plant.”

Last but not least, the man's got a product you might be able to afford for your home. In the quest for an item for his FIRST young engineers to sell -- a la Girl Scout cookies -- he tapped LED manufacturer Cree to produce an 450 lumen light bulb that draws just 7 watts and will retail for about $25 door-to-door. In case you're wondering, that's cheaper and more efficient than most any lamp we've seen before. Dean says they've already produced several hundred thousand of the bulbs thanks to a surprise $3 million investment from Google, and plan to have them in the hands of every FIRST kid soon. Keep on fighting the good fight, Dean. Dean Kamen at T

Consumers begin by downloading the Gyft app, which is free for both Android and iOS. They then add gift cards by entering the cards’ information, which is then stored in the owner’s “wallet” and can be redeemed in-store or online. Users can also send gift cards to their friends, if they so choose

According to the event page, 2,367 of the 6,000 I/O attendees actually checked in using the new version of Google+, then having the option to turn on party mode, which shares all of their photos on a public stream. The event was public because Google turned it into an “On Air” event. A lot of folks showed up to see Train and Paul Oakenfold perform, and it seems like quite a few of them shared photos to the event page. It’s not known how long the party kept up the 8K photos per hour, but it’s impressive none the less. I have however noticed that a lot of photos not taken at the event made its way to the stream. I’m not sure if that’s a bug, or if that’s a bi-product of the event being “On Air.” According to the slideshow from the event, 13,345 photos were shared in total: You’ll see the photos on the page sorted by popularity, which includes +1′s and comments. It’s not surprising that the most popular picture if of Gundotra and Sergey Brin, sporting the Glass.

“If it’s only mobile TV, we’re dissatisfied, we’re not happy with it,” Bill Stone, the Flo unit’s head, said in an interview. “There are going to be a lot of revenue streams off this service.”

Stone says the strain on mobile-phone networks caused by ballooning demand for video and data should make Flo attractive to service providers and phone makers. Flo works on a system using airwaves that Qualcomm bought in federal auctions. Flo- enabled devices have separate radios and chips that enable them to receive the service from Qualcomm’s transmitters. “One person streaming a video takes up as much bandwidth as 100 cell phone calls,” said Stone. “Networks break down and can’t handle it. For me, whether I have one or 1 million users, it doesn’t matter.”

Distributing magazines with high-resolution pictures is another area where Flo can send content to mobile devices more effectively than wireless-service providers, Stone said. His network would broadcast the data to everyone at once, with only handsets that have subscriptions enabled to access the files.

As it has taken off, Formspring has started to draw the attention of some major brands — last month, Fiat used it to help launch the Uno in Brazil, and Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort regularly takes to the site to answer fan questions (he’s responded to over 3,000 of them). Red Bull has just launched a new page. As with Facebook Pages, Formspring gives brands a relatively easy way to engage directly with their fans — this could well be the start of a new trend.

Digg founder Kevin Rose, after confirming that he’s leaving Diggnation at the end of this year, is now announcing his new show. It’s fforward

“This is all about finding a way to give advertisers the opportunities they used to have in the days of three networks,” said Mr. Manning, when marketers could effectively and efficiently reach huge audiences just by buying commercial time on ABC, CBS and NBC. “People are still watching television, but they’re spread out among hundreds of channels and the Internet,” Mr. Manning said. “The one place where people re-aggregate themselves back into a crowd again is the retail store.”